I have two partitions, one with my old Ubuntu 10.04, and one with my current Ubuntu 12.04. My old home is encrypted using ecryptfs, but I'm unsure what password I used when I set it up; the only thing I'm sure of is that I know my previous login password, and that when I log in in my previous Ubuntu, all my data is there.

Now I didn't forget that password, I'm just not sure what it is and I'd like to make a few "trials", but I'm not sure if I should begin with the sudo ecryptfs-add-passphrase --fnek right away. My previous login password is different from my current one.

ecryptfs-mount-private seems to run in the console, but no Private folders shows up in my home then, and I don't get any error message (and no message at all for that matter). When I click on the Access-Your-Private-Data.desktop in my old home, I see a console window that opens and shuts down right away. Finally ecryptfs-setup-private returns ERROR: wrapped-passphrase file already exists, use --force to overwrite. which means it's already setup correctly I guess?

Thanks in advance for your help!

EDIT:

Now that I think about it, I don't need to have these encrypted actually, I guess I just wanted to try out a nice feature of Ubuntu in my previous distro. Since I'm still able to login there, I don't mind "disabling" the encryption altogether if it's simpler than getting this pb fixed :)

1 Answer
1

I think you want ecryptfs-recover-private to "recover data from [your] encrypted home or encrypted private partitions. It is useful to run this from a LiveISO or a recovery image." It can use your old login passphrase to unwrap your ecrypfs mount passphrase and access your data.

You could also use ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase with your old login passphrase to find out what the ecryptfs mount passphrase is directly.